Feel The Excitement!

Hilarious.

Thanks to Bran for sending this along.

Cheers,
Mr.B

Here Comes RADIO LAB!

Okay, so I finally got clearance to talk about this on my blog from one of our marketing guys. I'm posting notice about this here, before I tell anyone else. Consider this your official advance warning!

"RADIO LAB's Live "War of the Worlds" program is coming to Vic tory Gar dens Theater in October!"

Two live performances by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of THIS show. On Sunday, Oct. 26th and Monday, Oct. 28th. I think that the Sunday show will be a matinee and the Monday show will be an evening performance.

Tickets will be $30 per performance. (There are ways to get that down to $25 per performance, if you get a $45 subscription to the Fresh Squee zed program, which includes discounted tickets for the Drink ing & Writ ing shows, and Lit erally Sexy, the sexy comedy, monologue show that I might be performing in, in September or November. Good for you. Good for the theater.) And the show will be performed on our beautiful and intimate 300+ seat mainstage. The Gem of Lincoln Avenue!

If you're a fan of the show or curious about it, in any way, you will WANT to get tickets to go see this show! I can't recommend this highly enough! I'm catching both performances!

Tickets go on sale on Sept. 1 and can be purchased by phone at 773-871-3000.

THIS SHOW WILL SELL OUT!
(They sold out the 700+ seat Fitzgerald Theater in Minneapolis/ St.Paul. Our 600 seats will go pretty quickly too. So get up on it!)

Very exciting, indeed!

Cheers,
Mr.B

The Nuzzle

The Trefrog posted this pic over in his Flickr group.



That's me and a friend at the Green Mill, listening to late night jazz after "Sickest Stories" last month.

Nice.

Cheers,
Mr.B

Barack Obama: The Fifth Beatle

Due to busy schedules and sheer exhaustion, I haven't been able to really watch most of the Democratic National Convention, this year. I know it's happening in Denver. And the brief clip that I caught of Mark Warner's speech and my first thought was that the DNC was competing with The recent Beijing Olympics for scale and grandeur. I thought his speech was a little wooden. Even he made the comparison to Obama's landmark speech in 2004 and he and I both thought that he was a slighter substitute.

Last night, however, I sat down with a small, late dinner and watched the MSNBC replay of Joe Biden's speech, accepting the Veep nomination from the democrats. I like Joe Biden. I've liked him for a while. I saw him on Bill Maher, a year or two ago and was really impressed by A.) how straightforward he was and B.) how fearless he was, when tangling with the Republican goon on the show that week. Biden is angry as Hell about how this country is being run into the ground. Which is good. Because I'm angry as Hell about it too. I always wanted him to have a position of more power, so that he could set things back on course. I really believe that he can do that.

His speech last night wasn't nearly as polished as the Joe Biden from two years ago. There were a few gaffe's when delivering his little "jokes". And at one point, the people in the audience would chant along, "More of the Same", with him, holding up a sign with McCain's name on it - and the slogan "More of the Same" on it. It felt a little "rehearsed" and wasn't nearly as effective as Fightin' Joe can be, when he's on an angry, ass-chewing tear!

But there were still flashes of what I think makes Joe Biden great. The story that he shared about how he lost his first wife is heart-breakingly sad. And I thought it was charming as Hell, when he gave a nod to his nonagenarian mother and she was there, nodding along with him. All in all, the speech was a B+.

Afterwards, when the nuts on the floor were hooting and hollering, and the band played a lackluster, karaoke version of Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" (Politicians have a bigger boner for Springsteen than anyone I actually know), Biden's wife Jill came out with a microphone and told Joe that she had a surprise visitor that wanted to come out and talk to him.

"Who is it?" says Biden, genuinely surprised. (I don't think that they rehearsed that bit.)

And then this happened...



Obama hits the stage and people go fucking apey in that auditorium. They absolutely lose their minds. Biden laughs playfully, as if to say, "Oh you scamp!" And Obama and Biden and Jill pose for a few quick pictures and Obama takes the microphone and gives a brief, slightly clunky recap of the previous two nights of the DNC. He gives shout-outs to Biden, Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. He gives "props to his peeps" and then invites "anyone within listening distance" to come to an even larger convention center, where he's going to "tear the roof off of that mutha!" Women swoon! Old people wave banners. Photogs take pics! Dogs and Cats! Living Together! Mass Hysteria!

Obama takes a few pics with Biden and they trade banter. I keenly watch their faces to see how they "REALLY" feel about each other and it looks genuinely appreciative. I buy it. I think that these two guys really dig each other! They WANT to work together. They WANT this to work. They WANT to change this country. I believe them.

Afterwards, Obama goes around the back of the stage, to shake hands with the new Democratic Rat Pack. I saw Pelosi there and Howard "The Deano" Dean and a few more familiar faces. All of them smiling at Obama like he's just pulled their children out of a deep well. Such genuine joy and admiration.

And it dawns on me... then and there... that Obama is the fifth Beatle. He's more popular than Jesus. People go absolutely bonkers when he's around. They want to look at him and touch him and shake his hand and take pictures of him. They want him to smile and make a joke and say something "presidential". He carries a tide of inevitability behind him, the sheer confidence of a man who is all but elected into the presidency, that people get caught up in his wake. Grown men and women look at him like those teenage girls used to look at the Beatles in those clips from the 1960's. There's a mad benevolence that their cool exteriors just can't hide.

There's some talk about how McCain has closed a bit of the polling gap between himself and Obama. About how his political ads are now using Hillary Clinton quotes form the primary to make the case that McCain can do it and Obama can make speeches. Blah Blah Blah.

Watching that clip last night and now aware that tonight he's going to speak in front of 75 freaking THOUSAND people, reminds me of what I already knew. It reminds me of my own Republican mother's excitement that the DNC is happening this week. That there's a motherfucking riptide of change gathering behind Obama. Change in how we decide our politicians. Change in what we expect them to do. Change in the steaming mouthloads of shit that we've swallowed in the last eight years. Change for Americans on the most basic levels.

I can't imagine the response that the flaccid Republican party could mount that will offer any resistance to what Barack is bringing.

It's going to be a slaughter, come November.

Thank God, right?

Cheers,
Mr.B

Blue Ball! Corner Pocket!

The only thing worse than being sent home, turned on and turned out, would be... oh I don't know, being turned on, given the clap and then turned out.

That would be worse.

The clap is always worse in these scenarios.

But being sent home, a little bit drunk and a whole lot unfulfilled, really sucks too.



I know how the monkey feels.

Cheers,
Mr.B

Toronto 2008: Stinger Round Table.

Want to know what it looks like to eat a nice lunch, out on the patio of a Canadian lunch bistro, with the members of International Stinger?

It looks just like this...


Click on the pic for a larger view.

Oh yeah,
You would probably also see this guy too...



Cheers,
Mr.B

//"And.."

And the night does funny things to a man

And everything you do or say is wrong

And because of this there's nothing that can be trusted anymore

And no one likes to listen to sad songs anymore

And there's nothing wrong here that can't be fixed by us finishing this bottle of vodka

And I don't want to, that's why

And nothin' ever stays the same, man, nothin'

And there was never a time like this before

And there will never be a time like this again

And I can't tell if the days, these days, are better than those days were

And you can't trust anybody, ya know?

And I'm sick of you, me, Wilson Picket, everybody, man, EVERYBODY

And I'm so glad to see so many of you people out there tonight

And the band is awful and so are the tunes

And I said to her, "Well, I can think of another option"...

And that was that

And I hope that I don't fall in love with you

And she looked at me

And I looked at her

And she looked at me

And I looked at her

And I said, "Ah fuck it"

And I downed my shot

And then I downed hers

And then I ordered two more

And I downed them too

And I couldn't remember what she'd done that was so irritating before

And I coulda' swore I wasn' drunk, but the barroom floor disagreed with me

And we hailed a cab

And she shoved me into it

And on the cab ride home, she was so loud that the cab driver pulled over and threatened to throw us out until I paid him twenty bucks to shut up and drive

And I'm not the man that I thought I would be

And I'm not the man that I think I should be

And I don't look the way that I want to

And I don't act the way that I want to

And I don't do the things that I want to

And sometimes it just feels like everythin' is just fallin' apart, ya know?

And sometimes I think that this is better than the alternative, ya know?

And the wheels on the bus go round and round...

the end

Toronto 2008: Everyone Say Cheese!

Here's the entire Toronto trip, documented solely in forced, group shots, taken with my camera on a timer. (I would run to get into the picture with everyone else.)

Click on this and give it a listen, while you look at the pics...





Behind The Playground Theater. Chicago, IL.
The Adventure Begins.


Rest Stop, Somewhere in Michigan.
Freshly Peed And Treated With Ice Cream Pops.


First Rest Stop In Canada, CA
Survived Immigration to Enter The Great White North.


Bloor Street, Toronto, CA
Waiting for Matt and Edison


Bloor Street, Toronto, CA
Edison drops his cigarettes, making a dash through Canadian traffic. Matt helpfully dodges them.


ComedyBar, Toronto, CA.
While racing to join the team before the timer expired, I crash through an unfinished wall of metal drywall studs. Some teammates notice. Others hold the pose for the picture.


ComedyBar, Toronto, CA
After replacing the drywall studs, we try that again.


Outside ComedyBar. Bloor Street. Toronto, CA.
Last night in town. After a killer set at the Bad Dog Theater.


Tim Horton's. Across the street from the hotel. Toronto, CA
Kathy barely makes it into the test shot.


Tim Horton's. Across the street from the hotel. Toronto, CA
Ready for a Long Car Ride Home. Ben is sneezing in this picture.


Some Tiny-Ass Town just across the Canadian Border.
Looking to drop our last loonies and toonies on sodas, candybars and coffee. Too tired to do much else.

Don't ask me why I thought it was a good idea to take such ridiculous poses in these pictures. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Cheers,
Mr.B

NYC 2008: What's Swingin' at The Port Authority Building?

Another little picture recaplet from my recent NYC visit.

Whilst riding the World's Longest Cab Ride to Ground Zero, we swung past the Port Authority building over on the west side of the island. (As west as you possibly can get, since the river is on the other side of the building and New Jersey is on the other side of the river.)

I had my camera hanging out of the cab, when I saw an amazing sight! They apparently teach TRAPEZE lessons on the rooftop of the New York Port Authority. The building itself is four stories tall and these rigs are another two or three stories on top of that. You've got to have balls of steel to trying swinging from bar to bar, six stories up, on the western-most edge of the island. I was pretty impressed.

These are the three pictures that I took of someone on their trapeze lesson.

Enjoy.
Mr.B

NYC 2008: Harz Feels The Turbulence!

I was just processing pics from my trip in New York and I saw this series of pics. I wanted to get them up here in the blog before I forget about them.

For the flight from Minneapolis, St.Paul to New York, Harz and I were on the same plane, in the back two seats on the left hand side. He had the window. I sat next to him. And some random guy sat to my right.

Taking off from Minneapolis was no problem. Smooth sailing.



Harz and I both plugged in our ipods and wasted the time away.

When we got over New York, we got our one and only view of The Statue of Liberty. I had Harz snap up this shot of it.



I didn't know it at the time, but that was my one and only view of it. We spent three days on the island, site-seeing like loons and never ONCE got another glimpse of it. What can I say? New York's a big fuckin' place.

Our view of Manhattan, itself, was pretty daunting.



Christ. That thing is HUGE. And there are so many buildings. I felt a little bit intimidated, when I saw this.

It was shortly after I took this picture that we hit a bad patch of turbulence that lasted until we landed at LaGuardia.

You should know that the next sequence of pictures are presented, without censorship and in the order that they were taken.

Harz had forewarned me that he "didn't fly very well". I didn't really know what that meant. I thought, he might've meant that it made him a little nervous. It does. Well, that and a whole lot more.

First, he start burping. And groaning to himself. And burping. As his nervous insides churned themselves into a whirling dervish of pastry and orange juice and whatever else you find inside a Harz.



"I don't feel so good," he said. "Feel my arm." I did and he was saturated with sweat. It occurred to me that this might not end well, at all.



The plane bounced up and down like a healthy pair of breasts on a roller coaster. We would leap up suddenly and then swing down and sway a bit. People on the rest of the airplane nervously laughed. The pilot assured us that this was pretty typical and that we needed to fasten our seatbelt. Beside me, Harz got paler and paler and continued to occasionally burp and mutter to himself.

With great import, he reached up and slid the barf-bag out of the seat in front of him and gently laid it in his lap.



I talked him through the experience like a calm, cool, licensed lamas teacher.

"Breathe, Harz. Control the breathes to get control over your body. Breathing aerates the body and relaxes the muscles. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth." As if this was the most normal thing in the world. Happens all the time.

Harz gamely tried everything I suggested. Both of us spoke in quiet, subdued voices. We didn't want to alarm the other travelers that we might be about to have a Harz blowout. He coughed for a bit and that turned into a gag and we were off to the races...



I want to state, here and now, that none of these were staged photographs. What you're seeing here is EXACTLY what it looks like. It's Harz, tossing his cookies. I figured that I was pretty useless to him, at this point. Harz was doing battle with his spasming stomach. Which freed me up to document the whole thing. I even thought, "this is going to make an outstanding blog entry, someday." Beside me, Harz loudly vomitted into the bag, within easy hearing range of everyone around us.



I began to notice the people around us, reacting to Harz's loud, pitiful barfing sound. All of us were belted in, so there wasn't a whole of "Looking around for who is barfing" to be done. People craned their necks and looked around at us. And I would look apologetically at them, what else could I do? I also rubbed Harz's back and talked calmly and quietly to him. The two teenage girls in front of us were getting sick from the sound of it and the pulled up the hoods of their hoodies and pulled a Kenny" on themselves, hoping to drown out the sound.

Harz barfed for the entirety of the landing. Each jostle or bank of the plane just shook him up that much more and there would be fresh waves of coughing, hacking and barfing all over again. Ironically enough, as soon as we touched down, Harz straightened up, sealed his barf-bag up and announced, "I gotta go piss. Bad!"

He'd weathered the worst part of the whole flight and came up a champ!



"Feel my arm now," he said and when I did, it was 100% different. No longer clammy and sweaty. He was cool as a cucumber. "I can't handle that turbulence, but I feel totally fine now." The plane taxi'd to our gate and Harz plotted his quickest route to the bathroom, immediately behind us.

I thought to myself that if THAT was how we landed in New York, things could only improve, right? Of course, they did. We just had one of those very memorable arrivals into town. To my knowledge that was the one and only time that one of us ralphed on that trip. So, that's something, right?

Cheers,
Mr.B

What I believe in...

Yesterday, I saw this secret posted over on PostSecret.



I liked it.

Generally speaking, it captures a fierce love of a few certain things. I like how it efficiently eliminates that which the writer DOESN'T believe in, but clearly identifies the things that the writer DOES believe in. I appreciate the writer's clarity.

But I definitely don't believe the same things that the writer does.

I DO believe in science.

I can measure science. I can repeat the effects of science. I can know a scientific thing to be true and then, if it's proven to be untrue, I can let go of that idea and embrace the new idea. I can actually evolve what I believe in. Science reflects the world around me that I can see, touch, taste and experience.

Faith, on the other hand, is only so much stubbornly-maintained self delusion. Giant, invisible men. Gothic devils with pitchforks and fire. Miracles. Benevolent guidance. Constant supervision. Obscure behavorial demands that aren't relevant in our contemporary world.

Science moves forward.
Faith holds you back.

Science is progress.
Faith is repression.

So, I've used my clunky, stilted Microsoft Paint skills to edit the above secret to reflect more of my motto. (With gratitude to the original artist for their inspirational, first work). I present... what I believe...



Now THAT is a creed that I can get behind!

Cheers,
Mr.B

Happy Birthday, Space Cat!

I know I promised not to post a thread on CIN about your birthday, this past weekend, but I never promised not to make a gay-ass post on my blog about it.

I hope that you had a happy birthday, out in Sunny California. I hope you and Kat got to spend some time together. And that you took a minute or two to reflect on where you were on your last birthday and where you are now and to recognize your considerable progress.

Keep me updated on your adventures.
I can't wait to see what you choose to do next.

Your friend,
Baby Brother.

Toronto-Bound: The Overhead Light In The ComedyBar

One of the two venues for the Toronto Improv festival, last week, was the Comedybar on Bloor Street. (As we drove down Bloor, we all took delight in vomitting up the name of businesses along Bloor, like "Bloor Video" and "Bloor Donuts!" Try saying "bloor" like you're about to vomit and then tack on a business. See? It's fun, even if you're not in Canada.) The ComedyBar was one of the two stages for this year's TIF. The bar itself, was under construction, readying for it's own Grand Opening a month or two from now.

Beyond the fact that it's a subterranean bar, the signage was a hastily tacked-on banner and all of the windows were papered over to discourage people from.. what? Looking in?


International Stinger tries to see inside to the stage for their show - roughly four hours away.

Not exactly a welcoming enviroment to entice the unsuspecting improv audience to step inside and see some imported shenanigans and goings-on!

Once inside, you would see that the bar itself was like any other comedy bar in any other town. Super sexy bartender! Dozens of improvisers trying to get a cheap beer. (At 4 bucks a drink, you could buy your beverage with two "toonies" and still tip with a "loony". We ended up saying crazy shit like that, all weekend long!)



It was Matt Larsen who discovered that the lights next to the bar were unfinished and were shining a bright, un-filtered light straight down in small, tight pools around the bar. Eventually someone would finish placing the fixtures in place and these tiny, mega-beams of light would be gone, but for now, they were there, shining white-hot, electric light in tiny pools.

And so we did what anyone would do in that situation...

We posed for pictures in it.

Matt Larsen went first...



And then Edison got into the swing of things...



I handed the camera off to Matt and he snapped this picture of me...



We called that my "Alex Ross" pose. Lifted straight from "Kingdom Come".

And of course, once we started talking superheroes, some poses just chose themselves...

J.Ben took flight...



And so did Matt...



And so did I...



Want to find the nerds in a room? Tell them that they can look like a character in an Alex Ross picture and watch them flock to it.

Sayjal looked over at us posing in the middle of semi-busy bar and said, "Hey! I want to play!"

And so she did...





Add one hoodie later and you get "Dark Sayjal"...



Edison said, "Oh! We're being villains now?!? Let me try one!"



Kathy, observing us giggling like schoolgirls and shouting "COOL!" after nearly every shot, wandered over and played with us too.

We got her best "Joker-style villain" shot...



And this this sort of wierd, hip-hop rapper busines...
(Matt pointed out the cool shadow that it left on her face.)



And then we got "Vogue-Kathy"...



And finally "Porn Movie Librarian Kathy"...



We also got a nice picture of this little retarded feller. Although nobody caught his name. I think he was with the festival, in some capacity. Sure looks like he's having fun, though, don't it?



It was Ben who later said, "Leave it to a bunch of improvisers to go to a bar and forget to drink, because they were too busy playing with a camera and an overhead light..."

Not to worry, we drank too.



PS. If anyone who reads this blog actually knows Alex Ross, please feel free to forward my picture onto him. If he needs me to pose for Black Adam or Vandal Savage or ... um... Doc Octopus, my email address is right here on the blog! I will do it for free!

Cheers,
Mr.B